So what purposefully counter-intuitive music article raised a
lot of question marks for you yesterday?

Unless we all missed a silly Weekly Standard essay
making the claim that GG Allin is best understood as an undercover
Christian rocker, whose songs reinforce “traditional values” by
taking scum-filth to its terminus point of meaning (and thus
subverting the scum impulse in general), my guess is it was Slate’s
close reading of Creed’s
awesomeness that got stuck in your aesthetic-critical craw.
People are already making much better ha-has than the one above, of
course. (Check the #slatepitches on Twitter, or just follow Brian Beutler
already.)

Unlike
Ezra Klein and
Matt Yglesias, though, I don’t really feel like I need to react
here by inveighing against the tiresome preponderance of
counter-intuitive articles, or even against Creed. The band’s
entirely earnest brand of boring anyone not operating under the
influence of an immature persecution complex has been old news for
about a decade already-and besides, by rising to elitist-bait so
adroitly, I’d simply be doing what Slate wanted its
counter-intuitiveness to achieve the first place.

But just because I’m not particularly in a mood to put Scott
Stapp down today, that doesn’t mean I won’t do it to Jonah Weiner,
a generally interesting critic who commits some fouls here that
turn out to be totally unrelated to his assessment of the cultural
import of a song like “Higher.” The first thing that struck me
while taking in “Creed is Good” was that it reads like the music
journalism equivalent of Sarah Palin’s GOP convention speech:
feisty, attention-grabbing for sure, and sort of difficult to
believe was executed in good faith by a responsible adult. I’m not
saying Weiner doesn’t genuinely like what he says he likes here.
But I doubt (or at least I hope) he doesn’t believe in the
ludicrously false dichotomy between intellect and emotion his piece
wants us to believe exists, simply because … well, maybe some
unnamed jerk hipster somewhere stupidly thinks her
immaculately-curated record collection makes her a better or
smarter person than regular folks who cotton to Creed.

This completely unsupported, faux populist, straw man passage
blows in particular: “And it’s not that the band didn’t deliver. To
the contrary, Creed seemed to irritate people precisely
because its music was so unabashedly calibrated towards
pleasure: Every surging riff, skyscraping chorus, and
cathartic chord progression telegraphed the band’s intention to
rock us, wow us, move us.” [emph. added]

Wait, who ever gave disliking pleasure as a reason for not
liking Creed? I’m actually pretty certain that while Creed’s intent
was to wow me, the reason I don’t like them is because I feel they
“didn’t deliver” in this regard.

There’s so much more unpacking to do here, insulting
implications-wise. You’re meant to understand that some music wants
to give you joy, and that this totally helpful classification
includes Creed, because they’re direct in their presentation and
don’t hide behind anything annoying like artifice or subtlety. And
then, I guess, there’s music that’s ashamed of pleasure or
otherwise objects to its delivery in some fashion. And, apparently,
the partisans of this latter style are inflexibly hostile to music
that intends to “move us,” because not only don’t they appreciate
being moved by music themselves, they’re angry when others find
this pleasure out in the world. These horrid people probably have
other reasons for listening to music that exist outside the
Aristotelian-sensual sphere, though the article doesn’t bother to
explain how this might work. At any rate, heal thyself, discerning
consumer of music: if you don’t like Creed, you best consider
whether you’re one of these snobs, or if you’re actually even into
the whole notion of getting pleasure from music as opposed to
posing about music.

And that’s just the part of this article that’s insulting to
listeners. How about the artists themselves? Well, the suggestion
seems to be that musicians who embrace sophistication or conceptual
gambits don’t really mean to move us as much as our misunderstood
hero, Scott Stapp. Miles Davis? Didn’t want to wow you like Creed,
by the way. And turns out, last year, folks got their hopes up for
Chinese Democracy for some other reason than that they
thought it might possibly rock them.

Now, in my job, I spend some part of my time talking to
musicians, and not only pop artists. Some of these people work in
unpopular or “difficult” genres, like noise, or jazz, or classical
music. And I swear I’ve never met a single individual among this
set who was driven into his or her life of penury and total
aesthetic dedication in order to make the few people they
encountered at concerts less joyful in life.

Just for example, this young composer named Mario Diaz de
LeÃƒÂ³n is working in a really fascinating way with chamber music
and electronics. It’s a union that could easily be lame as hell,
but he’s put some real heart into the enterprise, and his
absolutely phenomenal first CD, titled
Enter Houses Of, is a sensual delight (at least if you’re
the kind of person who likes Fennesz and/or Luciano Berio).

Believe it or not, I put that up because I wanted to improve
your day! I think the mix of alto flutes and laptop noise is
exquisite. And I know the composer hopes you’ll like it too.

Again, it’s worth saying that the critical argument Weiner
advances about Creed is a fine enough topic for a piece, as far as
it goes. Leave aside the author’s incomprehension over the disfavor
Creed has accrued over the years. (Though really, is it too
difficult to understand why the zeitgeist in 2009 may feel as
though this decade has heard enough from the species of the
“well-meaning, Bible-fluent doofus”?) There’s something deeply and
properly illogical at the heart of music criticism as an enterprise
in the first instance-the whole “dancing about architecture” thing.
How can we make sense in print (or online) about what we love at a
non-textual level? Anyone can make an argument for almost
anything-which is why people loathe critics in general, and yet
also find criticism rather addicting to consume. But rather than
constructing unexpected, potentially unpopular arguments by tearing
down competing traditions-or even worse, tapping into the easy
anti-intellectualism that dominates numerous other American debates
far too frequently-it’s probably better for us on the whole if
writers train their critical-poetic arts onto the works they want
to champion. The critic should reveal to us what it is we’ve been
missing, and if we find out the critic is correct, we’ll chastise
ourselves for having held blinkered assumptions-and we’ll do it on
our own time.

“‘Bullets’ is a
furious blast of metal and one of the most galvanizing persecution
anthems ever penned,” Weiner writes, trying to do just this in the
not-at-all objectionable part of his piece. The only problem is
that the evidence he submits for this claim-the lyrics “At least
look at me when you shoot a bullet through my head! Through my
head! Through my head!”-doesn’t do much to back up his praise.